Seriously regretting my boring choice of titles for these blog posts, but it’s too late to change it now.

Why, hello there! The last two weeks haven’t been the brilliantest for my work on GNOME Break Timer – partly because all my other unrelated projects, which I’ve been mostly ignoring in favour of Break Timer, have suddenly flared up and demanded attention – but I still got some nice stuff done. And I passed my statistics course and almost finished a cool charity website. (More on that soon, I hope?).

Most importantly, I decided that it’s time to add some tests. I added a test folder to the build system, and after bracing myself for a nightmare I was really impressed with how easy it was to get going. Further evidence that my fear of tests is entirely irrational.

With all the GNOME project automake stuff set up, I just needed to build a test runner using GLib’s test framework and list it in the TEST_PROGS variable. make check is figured out all on its own. So, that was lovely!

While everyone was off having fun at GUADEC, I fooled around writing unit tests. Of course, I did run into some trickiness: most of my time was spent making the application more testable (cursing Automake some more, putting everything in noinst_LTLIBRARIES), and fixing bugs that I encountered in the process of writing unit tests. This is all for a good cause, though: I am feeling more and more confident that the bus factor for this project can increase beyond 1.

Of course, I didn’t write unit tests for everything. That would be lovely, but it could also take quite a long time. (Quicker now, of course, since all the kinks have been worked out). Instead, I focused on parts of the application that I have broken by accident in the past: monitoring activity, and triggering breaks. The application uses many global things like system time, as well as timers and timeouts. Those can all be rather troublesome to test, unfortunately, but I found my way around them. I created a custom g_get_real_time function that will either return the actual time or a time set by the test suite, so we can rigorously test how certain objects behave as the time changes.

Most of this is quite boring, but I’m happy with it anyway. I wasn’t thrilled with glib’s syntax for writing a test suite – I’m used to wrapping these things in objects – so I borrowed the TestSuite and TestCase classes from libgee’s test suite, adding some extra twists.

Of course, you might note that this still isn’t thread-safe since we’re passing the same test_Example instance as the parameter for all of our SimpleTestCases, and the syntax is slightly unusual, but I’m quite fond of the extra brevity. One nice bit is this figures out the name of each test based on GObject type information, so we never need to write it explicitly. The test runner ultimately says that a test named “/test_Example/test_example_foo_is_bar” has passed, and it can deal with all sorts of stuff well away from the test code. It’s worked well so far, anyway.

So, that’s about it for the last two weeks. I also submitted an art request for some new icons, and I’m going to try following up on that where I can. This is definitely in the “polish” phase – just with a lot yet to be polished.